GOAT, Chelsea

(Never marry a goat in boats)

Despite living nearby, I always avoided this pub when it was The Goat and Boots. It's a pity  a friend of mine who married someone she first met there didn't follow my example. Days before her wedding, she asked me whether I thought she was too young to get hitched. It was clear to me that, as a result of a particularly cruel and complex childhood, craving security, she was about to say 'yes' to the first geezer that had offered to put a ring on her finger. Through rose-tinteds, she saw Sir Galahad where I saw the shite in not-so-shining armour he'd turn out to be, two kids, divorce and a bitter custody/ alimony battle later. My point is, I generally know what will work - and GOAT, after a wholesale makeover that has turned the moribund tavern into a gleaming post-industrial pizzeria/ diner/ cocktail bar has success written all over it. Firstly, the place looks good - particularly the split-level lounge upstairs whose wine and bubbles are honestly priced. Thin-crust pizza slathered in gloriously unctuous goo is 'the best I've ever tasted,' reckons my date. I wouldn't go that far: I still daydream about a sloppy Giuseppe I locked lips with on Long Island one summer, but if I were the MD of Zizzi, I'd be dangling a fat contract under GOAT's pizza chef's Neapolitan nose. If you're looking for a bop, an old skool DJ, housed in a reclaimed church pulpit, turns the first floor bar into the Devil's playground at weekends. Chipper staff, and the young Kiwi/ Russian couple that owns GOAT are utter sweethearts. But best of all, is a wee hush bar lurking behind an anonymous door. Cleverly done out like a study in a dour Edwardian manse - set to a scratchy 30's jazz soundtrack - The Chelsea Prayer Room comes on like a dipso vicar's guilty secret. Cocktails are on the money at £10 for Rhubarb Bellini and Woodford Reserve bourbon, sherry, lemon and plum bitters flip, Spanish Harlem. Any negatives? That depends on your tolerance for the sort of gilded clientele synonymous with this particular part of Cameron and Osborne's Britain. Hence, Willie Windsor's sister-in-law Pippa Perky-Bottom, and what looks like every extra ever featured in a certain TV series 'starring' the sort of silver-spoon-fed Binky Bellends that give eugenics a bad name, are in the house when I visit. Had my friend wed a goat of their ilk, her divorce settlement might have been considerably more generous than custody of the vacuum cleaner her lardy, tight- wad, waste-of-space husband gave her as a birthday present. 

333 Fulham Road SW10 9QL 7352 1384 www.goatchelsea.com/

Citizen Smith, Putney (CLOSED now LOST

On the basis that Clapham’s Lost Society and its Battersea bro’, Lost Angel, are worth negotiating our erratic transport system for, I risk the District Line with its ‘signaling problem at Earl’s Court’ to Putney for a Peroni and a pizza at those bars’ new sibling, a postmodern joint called Citizen Smith. It’s a curious choice of name; wasn’t Tooting, not Putney, home to the comedy TV Trotskyist revolutionary of that ilk played by Robert Lindsay? According to the blurb, CS is somewhere for ‘the everyday Joe Blog’s (sic) to drink in.’ Although Peroni isn’t offered, Joe can slake his thirst on useful alternatives, not least palatable Yanks Sierra Nevada Pale Ale on draught and Liberty and Brooklyn Brown from a decent range of bottles. Cocktails, from £6.50, are not your stock suburban alco-flops. Order Port Daiquiri or The Fruit of 43 Virgins - a name that sounds worryingly like summat a suicide bomber might fancy as his last earthly pleasure. Or perhaps not; surely the fat slug of proscriptive vodka therein would debar him from paradise? Pizzas, if not quite heavenly, are about worth the dough although a £9.50 ‘Herbivore’ is a chewy chore. Full marks for novelty: bacon, black pudding, sausage, egg, cherry toms and scallion on thin crust? Up the revolution!

160 Putney High Street SW15 8780 2235

March 2013 Venue is now LOST - part of Lost Society chain